Domestic servitude in India’s sunshine state – ‘Debriefing’ uneven, engaging
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CHENNAI, India, Nov 14, (Agencies): When celebrated Indian fashion designer Wendell Rodricks sat down to write his third book, haute couture was not on his mind.
He was thinking about his neighbour Rosa — an elderly woman who had lived her life as a poskem — adopted as a child by a wealthy family in the western Indian state of Goa, given their family name but condemned to a lifetime of domestic servitude.
Rodricks’ new novel — Poskem: Goans In The Shadows — is a fictional tale of four people caught up in a Goan tradition that finally appears to be dying out in the 21st century.
Rodricks writes of an unspoken world of the last generation of people who fell victim to the poskem tradition, preserving their story for posterity, the publisher’s note states.
The author, a Goan himself, describes it as “the sunshine state’s dark secret”.
“The worst part of being a poskem … was that the entire village knew of these people and did not treat them with respect,” Rodricks told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Alda, the protagonist of the book inspired by the real-life Rosa, discovers she is different from the other children in the house when she is 10.
While her six “siblings” went to school, she did household chores, and while they ate from porcelain plates, she ate in the kitchen with the servants.
“Poskem has so many emotions — incest, rape, seduction, love, hate, murder. But all this happened in reality,” Rodricks said at the book’s launch in India’s southern city of Chennai.
India’s 2011 census recorded more than 4 million labourers aged from five to 14 years old.
Poor
In Goa, one of India’s top tourist destinations, poskem were normally from poor families or illegitimate children, Rodricks said.
“They were taken into a family, given the family name, introduced to a religion but, for the most part, not given equal treatment like the other siblings in the house,” he said.
“Very often they had no right to property and were even selfishly denied marriage so that the family could keep them in lifelong servitude.”
Rodricks said his mother’s family had a poskem, but he did not know the meaning of the word when he was young.
He first understood what it meant in his twenties and later got to know more when he settled down in Goa and Rosa was his neighbour.
“The book is an apology to all the men and women who lived their lives as poskem in a 200-year-old tradition that has been rarely questioned,” he said.
“Debriefing: Collected Stories” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag is best known for her essays, but she also wrote novels, a play and short stories. A new book out this fall, “Debriefing”, brings together all of her shorter fiction in an uneven, intermittently engaging collection. Eight of the 11 stories previously appeared in the 1978 volume, “I, etcetera”. The other three were first published in The New Yorker.
First, the highlights. The autobiographical “Pilgrimage” may be worth the price of the book alone for its earnest, nerdy account of Sontag’s visit at age 14 — yes, 14 — to see her literary hero, Thomas Mann, who was then living in exile in Southern California.
Another gem, “The Way We Live Now”, first appeared in 1986, at the height of the AIDS crisis. Stitched together from snippets of conversation among friends of a man recently diagnosed with HIV, the story perfectly captures their vain, often self-serving concern for him, as well as the anxiety and ignorance that surrounded the disease in that era.
“Baby” is a chilling, funny transcript of a yearslong therapy session that borders on the surreal. We hear only the voices of the anxious parents, who desperately seek advice on how to raise their precious, precocious monster. It’s a setup that gives Sontag plenty of room to lampoon the cliches of modern parenting.
“The Dummy” is another charmer, a prescient fable about an office worker whose humdrum existence has become so intolerable that he builds a robot to replace himself, only to have to build a second robot for the first robot when the first robot also finds his life intolerable.
The rest are a mixed bag. “Project for a Trip to China” is a sort of diary of everything Sontag has ever thought or felt about China, organized as a series of lists, anecdotes and aphorisms that, in the end, add up to nothing. “Unguided Tour”, as the title suggests, is a free-form riff on travel assembled out of random memories, remembered conversations and the hackneyed language of tourist brochures.
These stories and others demonstrate an admirable willingness on Sontag’s part to abandon conventional forms of narration in favor of a more fragmented, elliptical, experimental style. In doing so, she may well have anticipated trends in contemporary avant-garde fiction, but some readers may need more of a reason to grapple with this strange and often difficult work.
“Future Home of the Living …” (Harper), by Louise Erdrich
Evolution runs amok in Louise Erdrich’s new novel, “Future Home of the Living …”. Ladybugs are the size of cats. Dragonflies have three-foot wingspans. Few women survive childbirth because of a fatal autoimmune response, and because infants are bigger, some are too big for the birth canal.
Incapable
These babies also walk sooner and are thought to be incapable of speech. An authoritarian government recruits patriotic women as “womb volunteers” to harbor embryos frozen before the mysterious calamity. Gourmet food is promised: “Our chefs are waiting for you!” intones Mother, the voice of the new regime.
Witnessing these alarming developments is Cedar Hawk Songmaker, who is pregnant and learning how valuable she may be to those who have assumed power in the United States. She begins her story — in diary entries addressed to her unborn child — as she reconnects with her birth mother, an Ojibwe gas station owner on a nearby reservation. Cedar is the adopted daughter of a liberal white couple in Minneapolis. She returns to the reservation to meet Mary Potts, known as “Sweetie”, her birth mom, as society begins to disintegrate.
“This is how the world ends, I think, everything crazy yet people doing normal things,” Cedar writes.
The details of normal life on the reservation, detached from the evolutionary goings-on and a larger political turmoil, make the story believable and therefore more frightening. Cedar accompanies Sweetie to a tribal council meeting — the entrance to the tribe’s office sits under the “outspread wings of a cast fiberglass eagle” — and later to a casino parking lot where the pair lay sod for a shrine to Kateri, the first Native American Catholic saint.
Sweetie has worked out the potential financial boon to the reservation of a shrine at a spot where gamblers have sighted the saint. Cedar is impressed. She has been underestimating her birth mother.
Her growing appreciation of older women, who help her on an increasingly perilous journey, becomes one of many themes for Erdrich to explore.
Known for her fluid novels of families, reservation life and Catholic faith, Erdrich is new to speculative fiction. “Future Home” owes a debt to Margaret Atwood and P.D. James, but Erdrich makes her own mark on the material.
The US Postal Service is “still operating under a secular postmaster general” and postal employees not only deliver mail but also move dissidents along an underground railroad to safety.
In a tense and memorable scene, Cedar’s adoptive mother, Sera, is reassuring and heroic with “the face of packing the car for a vacation … the face of the household general.” But Sera can still push Cedar’s buttons, as only a mother can. Stuck hiding together in a mop closet at the Minneapolis Post Office, they play out old emotional dramas, wounding each other before coming to terms again.
Some threads are left unresolved by the time this short novel ends. Erdrich may be setting up a sequel, or leaving her options open. While the final pages are beautifully written, the unanswered questions feel unsatisfying rather than intriguing. Still, this is a journey worth taking and a worthy addition to contemporary apocalyptic fiction.
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